Scholars in the Digital Age

Scholars in the Digital Age

Susan
Hockey
Arts Technologies for Learning Centre University of Alberta
Susan.Hockey@ualberta.ca

David
R.
Chesnutt
Division of Libraries and Information Services University of South Carolina
David.Chesnutt@sc.edu

Charles
B.
Lowry
University Libraries University of
Maryland

Christine
Martire
Vice President for Publishing Chadwick-Healey

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Susan Hockey, Chair
David R. Chesnutt
Charles B. Lowry
Christine Martire

Publication is the life-blood of scholarship. Academic careers are made or
broken on the basis of publication. The traditional model in the American
universities goes something like this. Scholarly articles are helpful, but
the analytical monograph is the key that leads first to promotion and tenure
from assistant professor to associate professor. And then a second or third
book leads to the rank of full professor. This tradition of academic
advancement through publications has served American universities for most
of this century, and has in fact hardened in the last two decades as
universities found an over-supply of newly-minted Ph.D.s in humanities
fields like history and literature.
Now, suddenly, the World Wide Web has introduced new forms of
publication--electronic journals, on-line book reviews, editions or archives
of primary source materials, and even a few monographs--to the degree that
the Web acts like a wild card which has been inadvertently shuffled into the
deck. Neither our colleagues in the humanities nor our university
administrators quite know what to make of all these new forms of
publication. In spite of the fact that many such projects are funded by
entities like the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Department of
Education, or similar government sources -- and in spite of the fact that
funding is based on rigorous peer review -- electronic publications are
seldom equated with print publications.
University presses and other scholarly publishers have heretofore played a
key role in the publication of almost every kind of scholarly work in
printed form. But the role they will play in the digital age seems very
unclear today. Scholarly publishers (university and commercial presses)
probably account for most of the books and journals on the shelves of our
research libraries. And scholarly publishing is big business--amounting to
billions of dollars each year. Given the complexity and the scope of the
industry, rapid change toward electronic publication seems unlikely.
The Johns Hopkins University Press, a fairly large university press, has
begun to face the challenges of the changing nature of publications. It
publishes about 250 books and almost 60 journals. And, in Project Muse,
Hopkins has one of the most successful electronic journals projects in the
United States. Project Muse eschews the "quick and dirty" PDF solution and
provides subscribers with full-text versions of 43 journals which the press
regularly publishes. Although Project Muse obviously draws support from the
general staffs which support marketing, subscriptions, accounting, an other
functions within the press, only three staff members handle the conversion
of the print editions into electronic editions. Two points are worth noting.
First, the press has a well-organized and expert staff dedicated to print
publications. Second, the press's major venture into electronic publishing
is essentially not much more than a replication of the print versions of the
journals.
Colin Day--the director of the University of Michigan Press-remarked several
years ago that electronic books and journals were going to look much like
their printed predecessors. He compared them to the early automobiles which
resembled wagons and carriages. In view of what we see on the Web today,
Day's prediction seems to be coming true. It may in fact take many years,
perhaps several decades, to evolve a new system of academic publication
which provides the recognition scholars need for advancement and provides
them with an environment which allows them to organize and deliver the
fruits of their scholarship in new and creative ways. Although a few
scholars are, and will continue to be, contributors to this evolutionary
process, most scholars will have to wait for publishers to develop new
social and business models which can support creative publications which
librarians will welcome into the digital libraries of tomorrow.
As to the evolutionary process itself, a number of seedlings are beginning to
dot the landscape--giving hope that the evolution will not take quite so
long. Three signs are worth pointing to: the current crop of scholarly
projects; the development of new graduate programs; and the emerging
infrastructure in libraries. Those of you engaged in building content for
the Web today are, in fact, pioneers. And as C.M. Sperberg-McQueen is fond
of saying, "The pioneers are often the ones you find by the side of the road
with arrows in their backs." Be that as it may, you are the risk-takers and
you are developing the intellectual models which will influence your
colleagues' perceptions of the possible. They will look at your work; they
will assimilate your ideas; and they will turn to you for help and guidance.
Given the strained resources which many of you work with, this will be a
drain on your resources and a burden of some magnitude. But of course, you
are not alone. Graduate studies in humanities computing are beginning to
gain recognition at universities like Oxford, Kings College, Alberta and
others. In addition technology is becoming an increasingly important element
in traditional courses where research is being expanded to include Internet
resources.
Libraries will be another major source of faculty development. One of the
more interesting developments today is the emergence of a partnership
between humanities computing and library and information science. The common
ground joining the two communities is SGML. Librarians are strong supporters
of standards and many have adopted the Encoding Archival Description DTD
which was developed to provide SGML encoding for finding aids and other
access tools in the library and archival communities. While large e-text
projects at the Library of Congress and libraries like Michigan and Virginia
were early adopters of the Text Encoding Initiative DTD, even more
encouraging is the fact that small libraries like those at Vermont and
William and Mary are moving toward the same standard--though in those cases,
they are using an extension of the TEI DTD developed for historical
documents by the Model Editions Partnership. Regardless of the DTDs, the
important point is that as libraries build Web resources based on the SGML
standard, they will contribute to the development of an SGML infrastructure
on their campuses. This in turn will provide faculty members with
knowledgeable people who can help them better understand the digital
environment for scholarly publishing.